Leominster: Birthplace of the Plastic Pink Flamingo

In 1957, Don Featherstone created the plastic pink flamingo, an icon of kitsch Americana.

  Featherstone had never seen a real flamingo, so he based his design on photographs he found in a National Geographic magazine.

 In the bright new world of post-World War Two American optimism, Featherstone’s pink birds were a symbol of the American dream and its ideals of the good life, like jetting off to an exotic locale – or at least dreaming about it. Plastic was the cheap, miracle material that aided America’s new consumer culture.

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